Unconventional lithography for hierarchical micro-/nanostructure arrays with well-aligned 1D crystalline...

We have developed a strategy for designing and fabricating hierarchical micro-/nanostructured arrays based on the combination of a colloidal monolayer substrate and the pulsed laser deposition (PLD) process. In this approach, microstructures are provided by the colloidal monolayer and can be tuned by changing colloidal monolayer periodicities, while crystalline nanostructures are supplied by PLD and can be controlled by PLD experiment parameters (e.g., ambient gas pressure). In comparison with the traditional lithography techniques, the proposed method has the obvious advantage of low cost. More importantly, the complicated hierarchical micro-/nanostructure arrays obtained by the present strategy cannot easily be designed and synthesized by traditional lithography techniques. This fact suggests that the proposed method can be a quite powerful alternative to fabricate complicated hierarchical arrays by complementing the weakness of traditional lithographic routes. In addition to these, the strategy also features uniform surface morphology, room-temperature reaction, and pure sample surfaces that are highly valuable to build a new generation of microdevices or nanodevices in nanophotonics, energy storage, etc. on the basis of these special hierarchical micro-/nanostructured arrays.